Judging Books by Their Covers

Geoff has written up a nice article about what he’s dubbed Early Social Bookmarking: cues he used to help him choose/select books from his school library.
I used to use a cue to help me find books too. But in my case there wasn’t a social element it was a simple visual cue. The technique was simple, and went like this: I would walk to the middle of the small portakabin that served as the local library in Dawley, and then slowly turn around and look at all the shelves from a distance. What I was looking for was books with yellow jackets.
Victor Gollancz published a lot of excellent novels including (and most importantly to me then), a lot of science fiction. All of their books had trademark yellow dust covers and so they easily stood out from others on the shelves.
Having found some candidate yellow books I simply strode across the room to take a closer look. Rinse and repeat.
So yes, I really did judge books by their covers. And very well it worked too.